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How BYOD And Big Data Are Changing Marketing

A chain reaction is a sequence of events causing additional reactions to feed back into the chain, amplifying it. For nuclear physicists, this is hardly news; but it is important for online marketers, whose world is full of search engines and social media.

Characteristically a chain reaction is identified by the critical impact of a single, key ingredient. In nuclear reactions this might be Uranium-235; on the Web, it’s data. In both cases, if you take the key ingredient away, the reaction stops cold.

As the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Movement gains momentum, it’s providing a competitive advantage for companies that were quick to implement it. This increases the pressure on other companies to jump on the bandwagon, which in turn accelerates the process.

No Action without Reaction

The BYOD movement has the potential to create significant impact on search and the way your customers navigate the Web. The reason lies in how companies traditionally operate.

As more and more jump on the BYOD trend and encourage it with partial subsidies their focus will be on devices that themselves offer a certain big-brand promise of reliability and performance. This will lead the market towards giants like Apple and Microsoft. Both companies have a controlled, easily synchronized environment and a reputation for enterprise focus.

Workplace practices have the habit of creating an impetus of their own. When almost everyone uses a particular device at work, it creates a silent peer pressure for the rest to fall in line.

When companies subsidize the purchase of devices, employees tend to buy top-of-the-line models. These factors affect consumer behavior outside work and create market trends that could lock out smaller operators.

Ultimately, when the market is led by the choices companies make in their BYOD policies, the barriers to entry become much higher.

However, Apple’s iPhone and iPad products, as well as Microsoft’s Surface tablet, and Windows Phone 8 platform provide more than just a compelling argument for enterprise approved subsidies. Each forms a complete, enclosed big-data silo, designed to lock users into a long-term relationship and keep their data within its walls.

This has the potential to radically change the online world.

Big Data: The Key to Everything

The Web runs on data. Everything we do there as individuals, from the queries we type in a search box, to the social connections we make, delivers data that are collected, read, analyzed and repurposed to provide more tailored online services. The search indexes of companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft rely on the accumulation of this big data to refine their programming and provide faster, more accurate results.

This is where the chain reaction begins to amplify itself. For example, if search at work is carried out through Bing on Microsoft Surface tablets and Windows Phone 8 smartphones, it becomes habitual behavior. It then takes a strong, conscious effort to switch back to, say, Google outside office hours.

Yet vendors like Google, Apple and Microsoft rely on devices running their platforms to deliver the data they need to help shape tomorrow’s business intelligence landscape and to sell digital services. Hence the strongly-fought competitive war being fought between them.

Until now, that big-data war was fought at an individual consumer level. The expansion of the battleground to include the BYOD workplace changes everything.

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BYOD is key to understanding which OS and devices are most suited for business processes in today’s world. Although it’s somewhat an opinion, it will still be interesting to see where enterprises progress from the era of Blackberry as the go to device.

As companies now consider COPE (Corporate Owned Personally Enabled) it would be interesting to see how mobile employees under one policy perform in comparison to those under another (BYOD vs. COPE).

Chris, thank you and wow! What a great point you raise. There is indeed a push-pull at work here between those who favour BYOD and the COPE movement and the picture, as you suggest, is muddied further by those who have yet to make a decision on whether they are sticking with Blackberry or not. It all points to the tumultuous change we are seeing int he workplace right now, arguably, the fastest rate of change in the last 60 years.